Mystery and Melancholy Surround Death of Judge Found in the Hudson

The last time someone heard from Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam apparently was on Tuesday when she called her chambers in the Graybar Building in Manhattan to say she wasn’t well and would not be coming in. At some point, she had left her apartment in Harlem, law enforcement officials said, departing without her wallet and cellphone, and locking the door behind her.

When Judge Abdus-Salaam — the first black woman to serve on New York State’s highest court — failed to appear at work on Wednesday, her assistant grew concerned and contacted her husband, who reported her missing, the law enforcement officials said. Then that afternoon, there was a terrible discovery: The judge’s body floating, fully clothed and with no apparent signs of trauma, in the Hudson River.

The unexpected death was shocking and saddening and even set off some suspicions among Judge Abdus-Salaam’s friends and colleagues, many of whom said she had given no indication that anyone — including herself — would want to do her harm.

In the hours after her body was found, the police said they were treating her death as a suicide. The judge, 65, had recently told friends and a doctor that she was suffering from stress. And tragedy had followed her closely: On Easter in 2012, her mother died at age 92. Two years later, around the same holiday, her brother shot himself to death, according to two law enforcement officials.

But by Thursday afternoon, investigators had reached no clear conclusion, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. The medical examiner’s office said that “the cause and manner of death were pending further studies”; police detectives were looking for surveillance video along her possible path to see if it revealed her movements, and whether or not it supported the theory that she had walked into the river.

When officers from the Police Department’s Harbor Unit pulled the judge’s body from the water near West 132nd Street on Wednesday afternoon, she was wearing a T-shirt, a sweater, sweatpants and sneakers, one of the officials said. She also wore a watch and had a MetroCard in her pocket.

“We’re all just shocked,” said Jonathan Lippman, a former chief judge of New York State who had served with her on the Court of Appeals. “No one has any idea what happened.”

Since 2013, Judge Abdus-Salaam had been one of seven judges on the high court. Before that, she served for about four years with the First Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, and for 15 years as a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan. She was previously a lawyer in the state attorney general’s office.

Judge Abdus-Salaam was known for her steadfast liberal voice, regularly siding with immigrants, the poor, and people with mental illnesses against established interests. She also leaned toward injured parties who brought claims of fraud or misconduct against wealthy corporations.

She was admired by her colleagues for her thoughtfulness, candor and finely crafted writing style. And she was not one to use her decisions as a soapbox even when they set precedents.

Judge Abdus-Salaam lived part time on 131st Street, on a block filled with brownstones that two or three decades ago was in dire straits. “My family was here during the Reagan crack era, and she was here when it was worse,” said Todd Milner, a 47-year-old filmmaker who has lived near the judge for more than 20 years. “That says a lot about her.”

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Judge Abdus-Salaam in 2013 with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., left, and Lt. Gov. Robert J. Duffy, far right, after she was sworn in by New York’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman.CreditHans Pennink/Associated Press

“For someone who had the type of power she was entrusted with, she was so humble,” Mr. Milner said.

Sean Johnson, who does maintenance for buildings on the block, still carries with him a two-year-old note from Judge Abdus-Salaam saying, “Thanks for keeping my property clean.”

“It made me feel good that she cared,” Mr. Johnson, 50, said, adding that he had seen the judge last week and had noticed nothing wrong. “She was her normal self,” he said. “A very nice lady.”

Like Mr. Johnson, many of Judge Abdus-Salaam’s friends and colleagues said they could not believe that she had killed herself, and investigators have not produced a suicide note. Steve Younger, a lawyer who knew the judge for 15 years, said he spoke with her last week when he asked if she could give a speech to his bar association.

And yet, other close friends, like Marilyn Mobley, an official at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said that Judge Abdus-Salaam had a heavy caseload and was in demand as a speaker and may have had trouble handling the pressure.

“What she shared with me is she had been under a lot of stress recently and that she was having trouble sleeping,” said Dr. Mobley, who saw her friend for breakfast in New York two weeks ago. “The truth is she was accomplished, resilient and strong, and she had a breaking point like everyone else. I fear it got there.”

Judge Abdus-Salaam was a cancer survivor, two officials said, but was not currently under treatment. She had visited her doctor on Monday, one official said, and told the physician that she had been “stressed with the demands of work” and “not spending enough time with her husband.”

Raised in Washington as one of seven children in a poor family, Judge Abdus-Salaam earned her law degree at Columbia University in 1977. She was married three times, most recently eight months ago to Gregory Jacobs, an Episcopal pastor. She divided her time between Albany and Harlem, though Mr. Jacobs kept a separate residence in Newark. (Her name led to confusion about whether or not she was Muslim. Gary Spencer, a spokesman for the Court of Appeals, said she had told him that she was not.)

After law school, Judge Abdus-Salaam became a public defender in Brooklyn and then served as an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Bureau of the state attorney general’s office. In one of her first cases, she won an anti-discrimination suit for more than 30 female New York City bus drivers who had been denied promotions.

Last summer, Judge Abdus-Salaam wrote an important decision, in the Matter of Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth A.C.C., that expanded the definition of what it means to be a parent. For 25 years, the court had held that the nonbiological parent in a same-sex couple had no standing to seek custody or visitation rights after a breakup.

But that, Judge Abdus-Salaam wrote, had become “unworkable when applied to increasingly varied familial relationships.” In a tightly reasoned decision, she wrote that nonbiological parents did have standing to seek custody if they showed “by clear and convincing evidence that all parties agreed to conceive a child and to raise the child together.”

In an interview in 2014 about black history, Judge Abdus-Salaam said that she had become interested in her family’s history as a young girl in public school and that her research had led her to discover that her great-grandfather was a slave in Virginia.

“All the way from Arrington, Va., where my family was the property of someone else, to my sitting on the highest court of the State of New York is amazing and huge,” she said. “It tells you and me what it is to know who we are and what we can do.”

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the circumstances of the death of Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam’s mother. She died at age 92, but did not take her own life, as two law enforcement officials had said.